The Patten Lecture Serieshttp://hdl.handle.net/2022/3191
Lectures from the William T. Patten FoundationFri, 28 Jul 2017 15:12:54 GMT2017-07-28T15:12:54ZThe Patten Lecture Serieshttps://scholarworks.iu.edu:443/dspace/bitstream/id/47090/http://hdl.handle.net/2022/3191
Taking Risks: Oil Frontiers and the Accumulation of Insecurityhttp://hdl.handle.net/2022/21263
Taking Risks: Oil Frontiers and the Accumulation of Insecurity
Watts, Michael
Oil frontiers are the social spaces associated with the exploration and development of one of the most global and strategically important resource sectors of contemporary capitalism: oil and gas fields. Through an examination of two oil frontiers – one in the Global South (Nigeria) and the other in the Global North (the Gulf of Mexico and the US outer continental shelf) – this lecture explores the particular qualities of frontiers in general, and why oil frontiers arise in conditions in which questions of authority, the rule of law and governance conspire to produce what I call the accumulation of insecurity. These oil frontiers were both marked by risks and forms of precariousness which culminated in profound crises: in one case, an environmental disaster (the blowout and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon in 2010), and in the other, the rise of an insurgency (in the Niger delta in 2005). Through a comparative examination of the dynamics of these two resource frontiers, I demonstrate how a geographical perspective can shed light on the shifting landscape of risk and precarity within neoliberal capitalism.
Michael Watts, Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Video recording of lecture presented on February 28, 2017, at Presidents Hall, Franklin Hall, Indiana University Bloomington.
Tue, 28 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/2022/212632017-02-28T00:00:00ZForty Years After: Reflections on Food, Famine and Hunger in the West African Sahelhttp://hdl.handle.net/2022/21262
Forty Years After: Reflections on Food, Famine and Hunger in the West African Sahel
Watts, Michael
Almost a half century ago, the West African Sahel – stretching from Senegal in the west to the Horn of Africa in the east – experienced a raft of massive food crises in which millions of people died from hunger and disease. Situated on this larger canvas, during the mid-1970s, I tried to understand the relations between drought-prone regions and the onset and dynamics of famine through an historical and local village study in northern Nigeria. The book which emerged from that research – Silent Violence – was published in 1983 but was reprinted in 2014 against the backdrop of recurrent and widespread hunger and food insecurity in the region. In 2016, some 4 million people were again confronting famine-like conditions in the northeast of Nigeria alone. In this lecture, I revisit Silent Violence as a way of exploring why hunger and famine have proved so durable and resistant in semi-arid West Africa. Currently, the region is caught between the challenges of global climate change and new threats associated with terrorism, illicit economies, and so-called "fragile and conflicted states." Most striking of all is the rise of a new and widely influential development discourse and form of analysis – resilience theory – which purports to offer new insight on vulnerability and food insecurity, and offers sets of practices to build resilient communities, households, and individuals: to make farmers and pastoralist drought- and famine-proof. By revisiting the critical analyses of famine that emerged in the 1980s, I offer an assessment of these contemporary approaches to food security in the Sahel and consider whether they are capable of resolving the serial food crises and the recurrent famine-proneness of the region.
Michael Watts, Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Video recording of lecture presented on March 3, 2017, at Presidents Hall, Franklin Hall, Indiana University Bloomington.
Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/2022/212622017-03-02T00:00:00ZTotentanz. Operationalizing Aby Warburg’s Atlas of imageshttp://hdl.handle.net/2022/21238
Totentanz. Operationalizing Aby Warburg’s Atlas of images
Moretti, Franco
Aby Warburg’s last and most ambitious project, the Atlas Mnemosyne – conceived in 1926 and truncated three years later by Warburg’s sudden death – consists of a series of large black panels, on which are attached black-and-white photographs of paintings, sculptures, tarot cards, stamps, coins, and other types of images. Its thousand images are unified by Warburg’s greatest conceptual creation: the idea of the Pathosformel, or formula for the expression of extreme passion. In this talk, the reflection on the Pathosformel will take the unusual form of an attempt at “operationalizing” the concept, transforming it into a series of quantitative operations. The resulting model is then used to analyze the evidence assembled by Warburg in Mnemosyne, and to gain a new understanding of how extreme emotional states are represented in painting.
Franco Moretti, Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor in the Humanities, Stanford UniversityVideo recording of lecture presented on January 26, 2017, at Presidents Hall, Franklin Hall, Indiana University Bloomington.
Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/2022/212382017-01-26T00:00:00ZPatterns and Interpretationhttp://hdl.handle.net/2022/21237
Patterns and Interpretation
Moretti, Franco
Digitization has completely changed the literary archive. Historians of the novel used to work on a few hundred nineteenth-century novels; today, we work on thousands of them; tomorrow, hundreds of thousands. This new size has had a major effect on literary history, obviously enough, but also on critical methodology; because, when we work on 200,000 novels instead of 200, we are not doing the same thing, 1,000 times bigger; we are doing a different thing. The new scale changes our relationship to the object of study, and in fact it changes the object itself, by making it entirely abstract. And the question arises: what does it mean to study literature as an abstraction and by means of abstractions? We clearly lose some important aspects of the literary experience. Do we gain anything?
Franco Moretti, Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University. Video recording of lecture presented on January 24, 2017, at Presidents Hall, Franklin Hall, Indiana University Bloomington.
Tue, 24 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://hdl.handle.net/2022/212372017-01-24T00:00:00Z